KIRKUS REVIEW

A Nova Scotia waterman
risks his life to salvage an abandoned vessel, then finds that no good deed
goes unpunished.

Phillip Scarnum ekes
out a marginal living delivering other people’s boats. In the middle of taking
the schooner Cerberus to its owner, Halifax dentist Dr. Greely,
he comes on the Kelly Lynn, a lobster boat stuck on a reef off Cape
Sambro. Though it’s blowing a gale and he’s alone aboard the Cerberus,
he succeeds in extricating the Kelly Lynn from the Sambro
Ridge and tows her into the Chester boatyard his old friend Charlie Isenor
owns, then buys and drinks a quart of Crown Royal in what turn out to be his
last quiet hours. The lobster boat’s owner, it turns out, is Bobby Falkenham,
the high-rolling businessman whose acquisitions include Scarnum’s ex-lover
Karen. And although he’s willing to pay top dollar as a salvage fee, and pay it
fast, the deal founders when the body of fisherman James Zinck washes ashore,
shot in the back. Jimmy had taken the Kelly Lynn out on her
last voyage; he’d specifically asked Doug Amos, his usual fishing partner, to
stay behind; and there’s every indication that he’d been using the boat to run
drugs. Although the local Mounties arrest Scarnum for cocaine possession and
murder, he faces even bigger problems: the appearance of Jimmy’s wife, Angela
Rodenhiser, who isn’t sure whether the baby she’s carrying is Jimmy’s,
Falkenham’s, or Scarnum’s, and a pair of Mexican enforcers convinced that
Scarnum’s salvage operation included the cocaine the Kelly Lynn was
carrying and determined to get back it from him one way or another.

Maher (Deadline,
2013) keeps the pot boiling by forgoing character development, moral
complexity, and plot twists in order to churn out one fast-paced action scene
after another. It’s all one-dimensional but highly effective if you’re in the
mood.

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